Windows XP/7 Dual Boot Issue

You should be fine if you get bootini on the active partition set up right.

That is odd - I just downloaded the zip file I posted earlier, looked in boot.ini and it has the entries I put in there for you - i copied and pasted them here ( you may have inadvertently deleted them):

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP" /fastdetect

is what it says. That should work fine. You can put "Windows XP Professional" if you prefer.


If still no joy, get rid of the Real Mode entry for ntldr, open an elevated cmd prompt, and type:

bcdedit /delete { put here the identifier- 36ac8764...etc}

Then press Enter. Should say it completed successfully.

Now type: (press enter after each command)

bcdedit /create {ntldr} /d “Windows XP Professional”
bcdedit /set {ntldr} device boot
bcdedit /set {ntldr} path ntldr
bcdedit /displayorder {ntldr} /addlast

You can put anything you like as the description between " ".

seanw said:

Yah, it sure is. Thank you again! Is it normal that I can't see my Windows 7 partition while in XP?

That's normal! 7 just like Vista would be the newer version of Windows. When booting into 7 and looking in the Disk Management tool XP should be seen as "Boot". That can be changed where you can mount the XP volume there by assigning a drive letter like D to it.

Glad to see the fix mbr option still works well. I was going to suggest that or booting off the 7 dvd if you saw 7 go on that way for the startup repair option. With 7 going on after XP there to a second primary you wouldn't need to copy any of the XP boot files over to the 7 primary.

If 7 had been installed on a second drive without the XP plugged you would then copy the XP files over and edit the boot.ini when adding XP into the 7 bcd there if the 7 drive was setup as the default boot device.

SIW2 I guess the #63 build still isn't far enough along quite yet to see that little problem corrected. The last one tried here was the #61 on the RC back in May where I then performed a repair install on the first 64bit RC installation when running into that.

To prevent the same problem later I simply used another tool called the BCD Editor found at System Tools - BCD Editor

The zip file you get there has both the 32bit and 64bit versions rolled up together where you simply extract the separate folders since both use the exact same name making that hard to tell them apart. For Vista and 7 that works well.